Zhisheng Yan, Assistant Professor, Information Sciences and Technology, is set to begin a project developing augmented 360-degree video for firefighters that will enable remote commanders to achieve panoramic visual cognition of the entire emergency scene in all viewing directions, even for out-of-sight events.
Yan will accomplish this by allowing remote commanders to not only switch viewports manually within a 360-degree scene, but also visualize machine-detected events of interest appearing outside of their viewport through a mini-viewport overlaid on the main viewport. Such a new incident command approach will augment the situation awareness of commanders and ultimately enhance firefighting productivity and safety.
“The scholarly/research importance is that compared to existing audio or two-dimensional video-based incident command systems, this project will investigate an incident command system capturing the 360-degree surrounding of emergency sites. It will also extend augmented reality technologies from regular two-dimension videos to 360-degree videos,” said Yan.
Yan will receive $150,000 from the National Science Foundation for this project. Funding will begin in October 2021 and will end in late September 2023.
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